So I have this weird disease that causes me to be terrible at goodbyes. Even symbolic non-goodbyes like your favorite person moving to England next week.

So in my head I know that Naomi and I can keep doing our talk/complain/commiserate/cheer-up thing that we do a few times a week. Even if she is in England.

The thing I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving:

The ability to say “Wait, I’m a grownup. You can’t make me play board games!”

You can’t make me! You can’t make me! You can’t make me!

But seriously, I really am a total hermit. I always way over-identified with the suspicious old recluse character in detective novels. And sometimes it scares me how much I LOVE hermit-ing it up.

The only thing I like more is saying muu muu. Muu muu.

I know this seems like not that big a deal really … especially after getting a new home and watching Texas lose to Chicago in Roller Derby.

But I really like my fuzzy grey wool hat.

So many incredible and unexpected things have come from this experiment so far.

Selma and I have gotten to eat biscuits with people I’ve long admired from afar. Like Colleen the Communicatrix and Jennifer “Oh how I love that woman!” Louden.

But most of all, this whole blogging thing has reminded me that I’m a writer first.

Best. Friday. Ever.

I’m so excited about Northwest Knockdown (three whole days of Roller Derby championship action right here in Portland!) and the extreme ass-kicking that is about to take place that I can hardly pull it together to chicken check in with you.

Root for my girls, okay? Not like they need it. But just in case.

So we’re moving into the house that I um, propositioned. Which, yes, is a good thing. And that happens in about a week and a half.

A lot of decisions feeling harder to make because I just want to wait until we’re all settled into the new place.

So our neighborhood is ridiculously halloween-obsessed.

To the point that pretty much everyone (except for us and the people I’m about to tell you about) is going mad trying to outdo each other by having more enormous glowing purple spiders on the roof than everyone else.

And then there is this one house with nothing. Just a tiny little wooden stick in the grass by a step that says in sweet little letters: *spooky*

Part of searching for a new home requires filling out incredibly obnoxious forms with enough invasively personal information to make one (okay, me) feel incredibly uncomfortable.

Even though I know it’s just “the way things are done”, each time it happens I pitch a fit.

Because really, it drives me crazy that I have to give a complete stranger my social security number, bank account numbers, credit card number and a hundred other things, and then just trust that a. they aren’t going to do anything nefarious with it and b. no one is going to break into their filing cabinet, you know?

Ugh.

Or: It’s an Ask Havi post gone horribly wrong …
I started writing an Ask Havi, and things went oh, slightly differently than I’d planned.
Yeah, people write to me all the time with questions … but there are a few questions that are different.
These are the ones that get asked with such predictable frequency [...]